One of the useful tools available to the painter today is the paint roller. It enables the artisan or the amateur to cover an area much quicker and with less effort than a brush, the old standard, particularly of professional house painters. One defect attached to the paint roller is the difficulty in cleaning it when the job is done. The roller has a much larger area than a brush and with the usual fairly dense nap is difficult to clean by hand.
Previous efforts in this field have included Frizzell, U.S. Pat. No. 4,402,333 disclosing a roller cleaner using a water jet to simultaneously wash and spin a paint roller; Russell, U.S. Pat. No. 5,413,133 disclosing a roller cleaner with a multiple orifice spraying the roller; Phipps, U.S. Pat. No. 5,095,928, also disclosing a cleaner with multiple jets impinging on a roller; Orton, U.S. Pat. No. 4,508,465 disclosing a garden hose attachment with a combination soaker and scraper to clean a roller; Hibberd, U.S. Pat. No. 4,708,152 disclosing a cleaner with a plurality of fan jets directed at the roller; Howe, U.S. Pat. No. 5,337,769 disclosing a drum device with a garden hose attachment spraying the roller, and Smith, U.S. Pat. No. 3,873,364 disclosing a paint roller horizontally mounted on a spindle in a downwardly opening hollow housing.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,505,220 discloses a paint roller cleaner having a tubular casing with four legs and two spray bars and an enclosed bottom surface.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,487,399 discloses a paint roller cleaner in which the roller is separated from the frame and mounted on a freely rotatable support frame with an internal spray tube at the center and an external spray tube on the outside of the housing with multiple spray nozzles.